Tagged writing

In a lot of ways, Briana Lawrence and Jessica Walsh are living the fandom dream. They met on an old-school mailing list and struck up a friendship, then more than a friendship, based on a mutual love of role-playing and fanfiction. Eventually, this evolved into telling stories not just for themselves but also for the many people they meet at conventions around the world. Now, many novels later, they’ve released the second book in their Hunters series—Beneath the Chapter,...

Local press Weirdpunk Books might have just made literary history: they managed to get a book published that features controversial personality G. G. Allin in various fantastic stories. They were able to make it using Kickstarter and it has been doing well as an indie-published book about a very, very niche personality. I was excited about every aspect of this project and it what it means for weird fiction, punk rock, and author crowdfunding, and I set up a...

Catherine Lundoff is a force in genre writing and studies. Her work has found audiences at both a local and national level. She’s produced a series of articles on “deep reading” for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) audiences and characters for SF Signal in addition to her own blogs and books. She’s certainly a force for expanding the vision of what genre writing is, so I took some time to talk to her about the past and...

My high school in Abu Dhabi was all about practicality and financial success. The administration pushed the sciences and nigh ignored the arts—if you couldn’t handle the sciences, which would get you into the top colleges and make the school look good, you were punished for it. In the 10th grade, I failed multiple weekly tests in physics, chemistry, and math. When you failed one of these tests, which was defined as getting less than 80 percent, you stayed...

If you’re attending next week’s Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference—better known to the world as AWP—it’s already a given that you’re a writing geek. But AWP also has plenty of offerings for your more specific “geek” tendencies. Here are some of the best panels that might appeal to those interests. Remember! If you don’t want to shell out for the full four-day registration ($255), you can buy a Saturday-only pass on-site for just $40. Considering the full...

My publisher, Blastgun Books, and I finally decided on a release date for my something of an opus science-fiction novel, Arcadian Gates. This has been a long road, full of the required ups and downs, and now is the time when I keep tell myself a few things to get through the countdown and time to follow. Whiskey isn’t a realistic solution to book release neurosis, so these thoughts will have to do. Don’t get me wrong, I love the book....

With the moronic furor over the Star Wars trailer’s “black Stormtrooper” in the recent past, this seems like a swell time to revisit the strangely controversial topic of cosplay. I’ll be honest; the crux of this article rests on the fact that I have had some small discomfort with cosplay myself. Nothing hostile, of course, but a primal discomfort with entire notion of making any sort of costume. There was a time when seeing a cosplayer would trigger something like...